The Rule of Thirds

by Matt Phillips

  Billy licked his lips. “I’m guessing you went after the man in the Mercedes? Am I right?”

  Chito tapped the table with his index finger. “I look at you and I see a man of great intelligence.”

  “Grass-y ass,” Billy Jake said.

  “Now, Billy, it’s your turn to make your choice. Like I had to make mine.” Chito held up both hands as if to pose a question. And then he did ask a question. “What is it you are going to do, Billy?”

  Billy didn’t hesitate. He said, “I want to follow the man in the Mercedes. I mean, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Chito looked at Sam, back to Billy. “I should have known you would understand the story of my beginnings. Tonight, I will send you across the border with some of my product.” He held out his hand and Billy Jake shook it. “We are now in business together, Billy. Welcome to the Ochoa family.”

  The Final Third

  They gave Billy Jake a Fast Pass. “What a tourist gets when he stays at one of the hotels in Baja,” was the way Chito described it. They gave Billy directions, too. He was supposed to follow the signs to the border—he knew how to get there himself—and then veer into the medical emergency line. Sam told him to be careful, that it was easy to miss. And Billy was careful. He was careful to locate the headlights and hazards when he got into the rundown Toyota Tercel. Careful to latch his seatbelt. Careful to prop his camera on the floor next to the passenger seat, make it look like it was stashed there. In case one of the border guards wanted a peek into the car. The camera was on, but he could pass that off as an accident. But when Billy turned left and saw the sign for the international border, he got cut off by a Mercedes SUV and ended up in the regular old border wait line. He tried to stop, but a Mexican municipal cop car appeared in his rearview and he had to keep moving. He watched for an opening to enter the next lane—the lanes were separated by high curbs—and never got one.

  Fuck me, Billy thought.

  He tossed the Fast Pass on the dash and kept following his lane. He didn’t know how important the Fast Pass was, whether Chito had it set up to send some product through. Or whether the guards on that side were on the cartel’s payroll. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What Billy did do was talk out loud, get it on camera.

  “I just missed the lane I was supposed to take. Now I’m in the regular border lane, circling around. I’m passing some storefronts, vendors selling cheap snacks and Mexican souvenirs. To be honest, I’m not certain what will happen now. I may have just made a vital mistake.” Billy wanted to look down at the camera, but he thought how it’d look on the big screen—maybe vain or off-putting. No, stay in silhouette here, your voice doing everything for the scene. “I’m approaching the back of the line here, cars stopped. Nobody moving. There’s vendors marching between the cars, little kids trying to sell pork rinds and sweet corn. What’s this—shit. It’s some guy trying to chase me down.” Billy Jake’s eyes were on the rearview, watching the man sprint after him. He turned around, watched as the guy approached and started knocking on the window. Billy leaned over, pumped the window crank.

  The guy reached in and snatched the Fast Pass from the dash. “This is a Fast Pass, mister. Fast Pass.” He tapped at the paper.

  “I know—I missed the turn.”

  “Back up, mister. You can back up here.” He pointed toward the storefronts. “Just back up, mister.”

  Fuck that, Billy thought. And get scooped up by the cops? Fuck the fuck out of that. “No, thank you—I’m okay. I’ll just wait.”

  “Anything is possible in Mexico, mister. Anything is possible.”

  Billy reached out and snatched the pass away, crumpled it up and tossed it into the back seat. “Look, man—I’m fucking fine. I’m not backing up, okay? Thanks for the help.” He leaned over and pumped the crank again, almost got the guy’s fingers caught. He watched in the rearview as the man walked back toward the storefronts, disappeared into a sea of people and cars. “Weird exchange,” Billy said to the camera. “Some guy demanding I back up and use the Fast Pass. Maybe a way to carjack me or something. Fuck, I hope I get through this, man.” He was wary of saying more, realized the border agents might search the car and watch the video. Shit, he had a whole conversation between him and Chito on the thing.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  The line moved like shit down a urinal’s drain. Billy waved off kid after kid, not interested in the latest tabloid or gimmicky toy. He’d crossed the border a few times since being down here, always in the same way. Felt stupid he had to wait even though he had the Fast Pass. Wondered again about Chito’s set up—was this mistake going to fuck things? If so, Billy had a couple decades in jail to consider.

  No—no fucking way. Chito guaranteed Billy to get through. As long as he didn’t get nervous or shit his pants. “You shit your pants,” Chito said, “And they going to smell it, no?” What a fucking comedian. Too goddamn funny, right?

  Yeah. Right.

  The line inched forward and Billy tried the radio. Nothing he could understand, the San Diego stations full of static. He switched it off, tried to think what to say. Decided on, “It’s funny here. So close to my country of origin, but so far from freedom. I can’t imagine how it must be to know you’ll never make the other side.” He shook his head. I’ll cut that. Too fucking sentimental. Like a made-for-tv doc you see on CNN or whatever. Closer now. Billy could see a border agent leaning out of the booth, asking questions. She grabbed passports from a driver, handed them back after a minute. Billy got to thinking about the drugs, the product. Where’d they hide it? How much? Maybe not much because Billy was driving it. He thought they hid it in the seats, sprayed it with something so the dogs wouldn’t hit on it. Or in a false compartment somewhere? Shit, how the fuck would he know. Part of the deal was that Billy could film them removing the product, setting it up for the next portion of the supply chain. One car to go—Jesus-fuck.

  Okay, rolling up now. Billy grabbed his passport from the passenger seat. He had the window down already, handed the passport to the agent as he pulled up. Gave her a quick smile. Not his crazy as fuck Billy Jake smile. The one he used for his parents and grandmother.

  “Where are you headed, sir?”

  “What—I’m sorry?”

  She put her solid browns on him and glared. “Where are you going?” She sniffed like she was smelling something bad.

  “San Diego—North County.”

  “What were you doing in Mexico?”

  “Vacation. Uh, letting off some steam.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Did you make any purchases?”

  Purchases? “Yeah, I mean…Some tacos, beer.”

  “Are you bringing anything back with you?”

  “Oh, shit. I see. I’m sorry. No. No. Not at all.”

  Those solid browns again. She handed his passport through the window. “Welcome home, Mr. Jake. Move forward, please.”

  And that was it.

  Easy-peasy.

  So simple it almost hurt.

  Billy Jake pulled forward, looked down at the camera. Fuck yes, he thought, I got it all in the can, baby. Every single fucking second.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Billy Jake was saying through the blatant noise of a Def Leppard standard. “Some tract home in North County. Neighborhood as nice as any. Two cars and two and a half kids, the whole bit.” He had that crazy smile on again. “I go in there and who is it but two cartel dudes—tattoos up the neck and everything. I got all this shit on camera. Not their faces, right? They wore masks, but I got the whole thing. Me crossing. The drive. Walking into the house. They pull the car into the garage and start digging around in the trunk. Rip some shit out and next thing I know I got a great shot of crystal meth coming out in brown plastic shopping bags.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes, poured herself a shot of Patrón. She was sick of hearing Billy Jake relive his heroic smuggling adventure, but she knew it was part of the grift. Sometimes you have to grind it out.

>   “The one guy, he calls it ice. And that’s what it looks like. The other guy standing there calling it shards, saying it’s so addictive you’d sell a piece of your momma for a chunk.” He shook his head, tipped back the beer in his hand and poured it down his throat.

  Rachel said, “Sounds like this was fun for you.” She watched that smile get a bit more crazy, saw the shine in Billy’s eyes.

  “Fun? Goddamn, Rachel. I’m making a fucking doc. And it’s going to be a killer. It’s going to get people excited. This is going to be a great fucking movie.” He almost shouted it across the bar.

  Rachel looked at the few men sitting in booths along the back wall. The Def Leppard song died and another hair band started up. Lucia was on stage at the moment, twisting in slow revolutions around the pole on stage. Sweet girl, Rachel thought. A three-year-old and doing classes at a tech college. IT program, if Rachel remembered right. One of the guys stood up and staggered toward the stage. He was skinny and wore construction boots, had a hard hat under his arm. He slumped into one of the round tables, found a seat. Set his hard hat on the chair next to him. He put his chin in a hand and watched Lucia. Rachel turned back to Billy and said, “You know you have me to thank for all this. From what I remember, you wanted to make a doc about strippers.” She raised her eyebrows at him, waited for that smirk to disappear into the folds of his big mouth.

  “You’re right. Shit.” He pointed at her with his near-empty beer bottle. “I do have you to thank. And when I put this fucker down and get it into post, you can fucking bet I give you a producer credit. Hey, look, it’s the least I can do. I promise you—oh, fuck.” Billy’s eyes were on the stage and his jaw dropped.

  Rachel turned, saw the skinny guy climbing onto the stage. He had a folding knife in one hand—a switchblade?—and Lucia was shrinking away from him. Fucking shit. Rachel hopped the bar and sprinted toward the stage. Out of the corner of her left eye she saw Eddie, the afternoon bouncer, sprinting down the hallway that led to the street. He was too late—Rachel tipped a table and it landed with a loud crack. It had to be her—if it was going to be anybody. The skinny guy was closer to Lucia now, the girl crouching against a back wall. Hair band guitar pummeled Rachel like a hurricane wind—screeches and caws and bent notes that scarred her ear drums. She jumped onto the stage and dug in for a hit. The skinny guy turned just as Rachel drilled him like a strong safety. Her teeth clicked hard and they went down together, the knife still in his right hand. “Help me, Lucia!” Rachel lunged for a wrist, got ahold of it as the skinny guy writhed like a snake, the knife waving back and forth in Rachel’s face. “Help me!” Lucia stood and kicked the skinny guy in the head with her black high heels. His eyes went blank and he started to kick at Rachel with everything he had. “Again, Lucia!” Another kick and Eddie was on the stage. He plowed into the three of them, pushed Rachel away as he started to pummel the skinny guy with sledgehammer fists.

  Someone had turned the music off and the only sound was the brief huffs from the skinny guy as he got pummeled into oblivion. When it stopped, Rachel twisted onto her ass. She sat on the stage with her head between her legs. Lucia cried beside her.

  Eddie kept saying “Cabrón-cabrón-cabrón” under his breath.

  After what felt like a long time, Rachel lifted her gaze to stare at the bar. Billy Jake was still on his bar stool and staring back at her. His beer was empty and the fancy movie camera was sitting on the bar, lens toward the stage.

  Motherfucker, Rachel thought. This shifty motherfucker.

  It was quiet except for Lucia. The men in the booths filed out of the bar, knew there wouldn’t be anything to see for some time. Eddie dragged the skinny guy down the hall, thumped his head a few times against the concrete floor. Rachel said, “Did you get all that, Billy Jake?”

  He nodded and said, “Man, you are one bad bitch. Aren’t you?”

  Sam and Chito were walking Tijuana Beach—headed north toward the border fence in the distance. A high sun burning down and giving them a treat, all the Mexican girls sunbathing in bikinis and Ray-Bans. Sam felt guilty for looking, longed for Rachel—the feel and taste of her. He liked the sand between his toes, worried a bit that his slacks would be dirty when he got back to the Fiat.

  Chito was in flower-printed board shorts, his bare belly spilling over his belt line. Gangster ink from back in the barrio on full display. Nobody giving a shit, all the beachgoers ignoring the drug peddler and his gringo employee.

  The surf reached them and Sam jumped out of the way. When he fell in beside Chito again he said, “I’m thinking this is a way for us to make some free money. The two of us—we put this kid on his ass and he scoots back across the border. No cops. No revenge. Nada.” Sam smiled at his try at Spanish—when in Rome, right?

  Chito sighed and said, “You bring me out here for a small thing like this? I don’t understand you, gringo.”

  “So nobody knows. So it doesn’t get back to your connection. And so we can take in the scenery.”

  “Look at the girls, no?” Chito liked that, but he liked business more. “You’re saying we get the kid’s money. He buys the drugs and we steal the drugs and money. You’re saying we get paid twice, and my connection…he gets whatever I want to give him—he gets nothing.”

  “That’s right, what I’m thinking.”

  “And we make the regular sale in Estados Unidos. En San Diego, no?”

  “You got it—that’s exactly it.”

  “Where is your woman in this?”

  Chito glanced at Sam and Sam felt it, that testing look. He needed to tell the truth. “She brought me the kid. He wanted to make a doc about strippers, but she convinced him that our work—what I do for you—was worth putting on film.”

  “For who?” Chito’s question was an honest one.

  They were about fifty yards from the border fence, the yellow sand empty on the American side. Vacant all the way up to Imperial Beach. And the Mexican side full of families and couples and those girls in their skimpy bikinis. “The kid thinks he’s some kind of artist. He wants to make movies. It’s an easy sell—he’s already in the thing and, well, it’s the next step.”

  “You’re still not telling me. Who watches this shit?”

  Sam sighed now. “Americans, you know? Fucking housewives. I don’t know. They think it’s…exotic?”

  Chito chuckled. “They buy the drugs—Americans.”

  Sam couldn’t disagree. Nor would he.

  “Fucking Americanos. Call us the evil ones and they get all the pleasure. Don’t you call that something, when someone—”

  “Asshole,” Sam said. “We call it being an asshole.”

  They reached the border fence and stood there looking through the slats, a nice breeze coming at them off the Pacific.

  Chito said, “How much are you going to take off him?”

  “Twenty.”

  Chito nodded and said, “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Forty,” Sam said with a pained look on his face.

  “I’ll take half. Because I’m a fair man.”

  Sam wanted to tell him to fuck off, but instead he nodded. Knew he needed to find a way to take it all, to get him and Rachel out of Tijuana before Chito and his boys could grind them into dust. Or plug them full of holes. After that, they disappear—off the grid.

  “I could take more, you know.”

  “Half is more than fair,” Sam said.

  Chito rapped on the fence, evoked a hollow metal sound. He looked up at the top, where the fence met endless blue sky, chuckled again. “The way you Americans do business—it’s entertaining.”

  “You wanted me to offer half? Whatever happened to—”

  “Not that, gringo. It’s the movie that I’m thinking about. This kid, this boy, spends his daddy’s money on film school. He comes to Mexico because he wants to exploit us, wants to make movies about all the evil in our society. He wants Tijuana to look like a hell. And he wants to show this mo
vie—to sell it—to all the white people who want to feel good about their own shitty lives.”

  “Too much philosophy for me.”

  “And your people—you—are the ones who buy the drugs we move across the border. You put up fences and call us names, and you sniff it all up your nose and shoot it into your blood. You’re as dirty as the dirtiest Mexican. No—more dirty.”

  “Look, Chito. I’m just trying to make some money here. I can’t—”

  “Assholes,” Chito said. “You’re all assholes.”

  “Some of these people are addicted, man.”

  Chito laughed hard at that and his belly jumped in comic exaggeration. “Addiction. Yes! That! The American way! Funny to hear such a thing from you—what happened to your revolution? Your independence? I know they call it something…” He looked at the sky in deep thought.

  “Rugged individualism,” Sam said.

  “That’s it. Whatever happened to your rugged individualism?”

  Sam shook his head in wonder. “I guess the ones that still got it, we crossed over to the other side.”

  “Mexico?”

  “No—the dark side. We all got to being grifters and crooks.”

  “I see. You gave up on the American Dream then?”

  “Shit,” Sam said. “We made that up just so we could take what we wanted from people. That’s the biggest con there is. Works good, too.”

  “Mexico needs something like this.”

  “The Mexican Dream?”

  “For hope, no?”

  Sam smiled. “It sure makes people feel good.”